Category: Reports

Increased targeting of International Solidarity Movement

In this article Michael Shaik, Media Coordinator of the International Solidarity Movement writes about two recent events with direct bearing on Israel’s murder of Rachel Corrie.

On 14 February 2002 the ISM faced two almost simultaneous crisis in Rafah and Nablus. Both involved incidents where members of the ISM were in danger of being killed or seriously injured by the soldiers of the Israeli Occupying Army while conducting non-violent resistance to the occupation.

Rafah
At 2 pm on Friday the ISM received word that Israeli military bulldozers were demolishing houses in Rafah town in the south of the Gaza Strip. The destruction is part of Israel’s “Apartheid Wall” policy towards the Occupied Territories. Whereby Palestinians communities will be sealed from the outside world by a massive series of walls, complete with towers from which military sharpshooters can monitor their activities. The section of the Wall under construction near Rafah stretches along the entire length of Gaza’s border with Egypt. To give the snipers in the wall’s towers clear fields of fire, the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza intend to demolish all the houses within 70 – 100 metres of the wall

As soon as they received word of the demolitions seven activists (3 US, 3 UK and 1 Dutch) left ISM Rafah headquarters in Gaza to resist them. The site of the demolitions was in an area of Rafah known of “Block O” that is overlooked by four of the wall’s towers including the infamous Saleh e-Deen Tower from which Israeli snipers have murdered several of Rafah’s residents. When they arrived the activists saw a row of six houses being systematically bulldozed by two Israeli military bulldozers guarded by a tank. They were unable to approach the bulldozers directly because of landmines but found an alternative route to the devastation, which bypassed the minefield.

As soon as the activists began to approach the bulldozers they were fired upon from the towers and the tanks which directed rifle and machine gun fire at the ground in front of them. Using their megaphone the activists announced that they were unarmed international peace activists and continued to advance. The tank and the soldiers in the towers continued to fire warning shots at them but the activists refused to submit to their intimidation and continued their approach.

As soon as the activists came under fire they phoned the ISM media office to alert me to the danger they were under and I immediately made an emergency call to the US consulate in Tel Aviv to inform them what was happening and request that they alert the headquarters of the Israeli occupying forces in the Gaza Strip that there were international peace activists (including 3 Americans) in Rafah Town that were coming under fire from Israeli troops and ask them to please exercise restraint (the standard ISM procedure in such circumstances).

After being put on hold several times. I had the following conversation with US consulate staff:

Diplomat: I’m sorry but its Shabbat and we can’t contact anyone in the Army because they’re all on holiday.

ISM: On holiday? Then what are they doing demolishing houses in Rafah and shooting and international volunteers for?

Diplomat: I’m sorry but we don’t have anyone we can contact in the Army.

ISM: Then phone the Department of Foreign Affairs and tell them to contact the Army. [The standard protocol under such circumstances.]

Diplomat: What are they doing in the area?

ISM: They’re trying to stop house… Can I speak to the consul please?

Diplomat: Please hold a minute…

Ingrid Barzel: How can I help you?

ISM: This is an emergency call about a group of International Peace Activists in Rafah Town that are being fired upon by Israeli troops. I’m phoning you because I want you to get in contact with the Army and advise them that there are American nationals in the area and ask them to please exercise restraint.

Ingrid Barzel: Please advise your people there to leave the area.

ISM: Look they’re in the area and they don’t intend to go anywhere. They’re trying to stop houses being demolished by military bulldozers.

Ingrid Barzel: We have a travel advisory against traveling to the Gaza Strip and if these people are there they are there illegally. [This is untrue to enter the Gaza Strip one has to have a special authorisation stamp in one’s passport and all the Rafah activists have one.]

ISM: What if one of them gets killed? Will you hide behind your excuses then?

Ingrid Barzel: They’re not excuses. It’s State Department procedure endorsed by the Secretary of State.

ISM: So what you’re saying is you take no responsibility for the welfare of your nationals dong peace work in the Gaza Strip even if this means one of them gets killed because of your inaction?

Ingrid Barzel: We do not accept any responsibility for anyone who ignores our travel advisories and illegally enters the Gaza Strip.

ISM: What is your name?

[Pause]

Ingrid Barzel: I’d be happy to give you my name. It’s Ingrid Barzel.

ISM: Right, now I know how useless you are I’ll never phone you again. I also got in touch with the British consulate who said they’d phone me back but seem to have got in touch with the Gaza military headquarters and the Dutch consulate which was on holiday and had an answering machine operating.

Meanwhile the ISM activists had reached the building that the bulldozers were demolishing while the tank and the towers had fired warning shots at them every step of the way. Two of the activists then stepped into the partially destroyed building preventing the bulldozers from any further destruction while the tank fired its machine gun over their heads. The bulldozer then retreated but then the tank rolled forward to within three feet of them and an uneasy stalemate followed until the tanks backed away. Then the bulldozer came forward again as the other five activists rushed to join their companions in the building and the tank resumed firing its machine gun.

This time the bulldozer didn’t stop and five of the activists were able to scramble away while two others became trapped by the bulldozer in a corner of the building. When the bulldozer found its path blocked by rumble and backed off before resuming its advance the two were able to get away and stand on some barrels next to the building to photograph and film the destruction but the bulldozer then began ramming the barrels.

By this time the tank had begun firing its machine gun at some nearby houses which the activists knew were inhabited by families so the activists went to stand between the tank and the houses so that the tank was unable to continue terrorising the people in the houses although it resumed firing its machine gun at the feet of the activists.

At this point a member of the Palestinian resistance seems to have thrown a pipe bomb at one of the bulldozers. This development increased the risk to the activists because there was now a danger that they would be caught in a fire fight between the Israeli occupation forces and the Palestinian resistance so they retreated to a nearby house to watch and film the demolition. They were joined in the building by two old women who were the owners of the houses that were being destroyed who wept at the sight. When the bulldozers finished their demolitions of the block of six houses they withdrew with the tank.

When they had gone, the community who lived in the neighbourhood rushed out to the site of the wreckage to help its former residents salvage what they could from what had once been their homes. Among the items they retrieved were a bicycle, a water tank, and electrical cord and some planks of wood. After 20 minutes of searching the rubble the soldiers in the towers began firing at them, forcing them to abandon the wreckage. A man told one of the activists that this was the pattern of such salvage operations: the sentinels generally give the people about half an hour to retrieve what they can before firing on them.

Nablus
At 3.50 pm, just as the Rafah crisis was drawing to a close, 12 ISM activists based in Rafah were trying to deliver chocolates to the Abu Sanfar house in East Nablus which the Israeli army of occupation had been using as a firing position for forty days while detaining the three families resident in the house in two of its rooms.

When the activists approached the house they were confronted by Israeli soldiers commanded by Ariel Ze’ev who is known by Palestinians and ISM activists living in Nablus to be an insane sadist. Ariel and his men quickly became violent toward the activists and then, at 4.10 pm, seized Hussein Khalili, a Palestinian member of the ISM, and dragged him back to the house before firing warning shots at the activists, forcing them to fall back.

Immediately, the activists phoned the ISM Media Centre to alert me of their situation and I immediately called the Hamoked and Gush Shalom human rights organisations (the ISM’s allies in the struggle against the occupation) and Dennis Brenstein of Flashpoints Radio in the USA before drafting an email to our supporters informing them of what had happened. Through our combined efforts we were able to alert people around the world of Hussein’s plight and issue a joint appeal for them to phone the District Coordination Office of the Israeli Army in the Nablus area to demand Hussein’s immediate release.

Meanwhile, an Israeli member of the ISM and another activist returned to the Abu Sanfar house to negotiate Hussein’s release. When Ariel realised that one of the activists was an Israeli Jew he became furious and promised that he would make Hussein suffer more because of her and that he would arrest a Palestinian every time he saw her. He also said that he would hold him for two weeks if necessary “as revenge” for what she had done.

He then went into the house and took Hussein into he garden of the Abu Sanfar house where his men bound his hands behind his back forced him to kneel on the rocky ground in the rain while Ariel Ze’ev kicked him in the back.

Hussein was forced to kneel in the rain for what he estimates were forty five minutes. Eventually, Ariel went inside and a new group of soldiers released his hands and took him under shelter where they verbally insulted him and told him that the only good Arab was a dead Arab and that he was just a fucking peacemaker. They also told him that the Israeli activist was a whore for helping the Palestinians and that what she had done made her no longer Israeli and that she should be kicked out to the country. When Hussein protested that the activists had only come to the house to comfort the children the soldier said that they did not care and that they were in Nablus to kill all the Arabs.

“Even the women and children?” Hussein inquired.

“Yes!” they replied. “They throw petrol bombs and stones at us and threaten our lives so we will kill them too!”

While Hussein was being abused, the Nablus area DCO was being inundated with phone calls. We have no way of knowing exactly how many people phoned in to demand his release but ISM activists watching the Abu Sanfar house saw an Israeli lieutenant-colonel arrive in a hummer soon after the phone-in campaign started. He told the activists that he had made a decision that Hussein would be held in the house until 10 pm and then released.

Shortly thereafter I began receiving calls from people from around the world asking what more they could do. I said all that they could do was to forward the email to their everyone in their address book. One man told me that he had already emailed it to over 200 people. A woman asked me if she should contact the US consulate in Tel Aviv but I told her it would be futile since they no longer accept responsibility for their own nationals in the ISM.

At 8.50 pm Hussein Khalili was set free. He told his captors that he was afraid to go out into the streets in the dark because there were tanks and soldiers on the streets who might shoot him if they saw him but was told that all the soldiers in the area had been warned about him and that he would be safe. He then made his way across the road to a neighbouring house where he was given tea and water and used the phone to phone his companions in Nablus who came over to take him home.

As soon as I received word of his release I alerted his wife and then sent out an email to our supporters informing them of the success of our phone in campaign. Even so the Nablus area DCO continued to be flooded with phone calls until mid way through the following morning. Two supporters have informed me that as soon as she got through the officer on duty said: “Hussein Khalili has been released before they could even state the reason for their calls.

Conclusion
On February 14 2002 the ISM’s mission in Occupied Palestine came as close as it has ever come to collapse. Though its international activists have often encountered a level of hostility from their missions in Israel which are expected to protect them, this is the first time a consulate has stated explicitly that it will take no responsibility whatsoever for the welfare of its nationals performing peace work in the Occupied Territories.

Had Ariel Ze’ev made good on his threat to hold Hussein for two weeks and had the ISM proved powerless to protect one of our own from such arbitrary abuse, it would have proven to both the Palestinians and their occupiers that we are now an irrelevant movement.

Yet thanks to the efforts of our supporters throughout the world we were able to confound Ariel’s threats and secure Hussein’s release and safe passage in less than four hours. Though many activists made their calls to the DCO after Hussein’s release, they should not feel that their calls were wasted. This marks the first time the ISM and its allies have organised a phone-in campaign on such a large scale at such short notice and with such an effect.

Throughout Occupied Palestine but particularly in the Nablus area, ISM activists have come under increasing pressure from the Israeli occupying forces in an effort to intimidate them into ineffectiveness through threats and low-level violence. We believe that this is part of an Israeli plan to step up its campaign of terror against the people of Palestine once the US commences its invasion of Iraq.

The remarkable effectiveness of the campaign to free Hussein Khalili on Friday has demonstrated to the architects of this terror that the ISM can no longer be considered as only a handful of brave activists scattered throughout the Occupied Territories but has now matured into a truly global movement capable of mobilising a very large number of people around the world in defence of Palestinian human rights.

Thank-you to everyone who participated in the phone in. Thank-you for your messages of support. And thank-you for forwarding the emails to your friends. We’ve still got a long way to go before Palestine becomes a free country but, because of your efforts, ISM activists working in places like Rafah and Nablus can continue their work in the knowledge that they are not alone, even if their governments have now renounced their responsibility to protect them.

Human Rights Abuses & Looting in Nablus

David Watson

Two ISM activists from the USA heard horrifying reports from residents regarding human rights abuses in Nablus as Israeli Occupying Forces continued their offensive on the old city.

The house of Mr. Ayman Badia Abdul Hadi received a visit from the military at 4.00 am Monday morning. He and his family were reportedly made to stand in the street without any food, water or access to a toilet for the next sixteen hours. No exception was made for any of the family’s children, the youngest of whom has a baby which was held by Mr. Abdul Hadi and his wife throughout the ordeal. The soldiers gave no reason for the family’s harassment merely asking, “Where are the terrorists?”

When the family was unable to give a response the soldiers proceeded to ransack the family house.

The two ISM activists had come to pay a visit to the family in the morning but had been sent away by the military presence.

In a separate incident a deaf man’s house in Qarayoun Square was visited by Israeli soldiers on Monday morning. Mr Auni Mansour has six children, three of whom are also deaf. After making a search of the house the soldiers focused their attention on a locked cabinet holding family valuables. They blew the lock off the door and stole the money and gold possessions lying inside.

However they wanted to leave the family with a reminder of their visit. In a final act of petty spite they found four hearing aids belonging to Mr. Mansour and his three deaf children and laughed while they stamped them into pieces.

Bethlehem nabbing

by Kristin Ess

Yesterday Israeli soldiers were standing in the middle of baba skak (the main intersection in Bethlehem) pointing guns at school children and screaming at them to go home. All the little kids here wear uniforms to school, and all the kids are just so short in these little dresses and sweaters. A foreigner who lives in Hebron told me he asked Israeli soldiers why they were pointing guns at school girls the other day, preventing them from going to their elementary school. They answered him, “because they’re terrorists.”

A young women named Neda wrote “Midnight Victim” after talking to her friend just now, the girl in Beit Sahour who just got out of Israeli jail. Israeli soldiers abducted 3 young women from Bethlehem – one from Deheisha Camp, one from Beit Jala, and one from Beit Sahour – two nights ago.

Israeli soldiers opened fire on a small group of children in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp

by Kristin Ess

Just over an hour ago Israeli soldiers opened fire on a small group of children in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp.
The Israeli occupying army entered the camp, as they do most days and nights, in jeeps,with their tanks rumbling on the side roads.

The Israeli soldiers were throwing tear gas into the camp, choking its Palestinian residents who could not escape from their homes because the Israeli military had imposed curfew on them. To leave ones home means arrest or death.
A group of Palestinian children protested the Israeli invasion by throwing stones at the heavily armoured jeeps and tanks. Israeli soldiers shot the kids.

One is dead. His name was Tariq Abu Jadu. Ambulances could not reach the camp. Two other kids are still in critical condition in the hospital. One is 15, the other is just 12 years old. A few people in the camp snuck out with the three to take them to the hospital. They live in a refugee camp in a Palestinian city which suffers from Israeli invasion after invasion.

The Israeli military government imposes curfew on them which deems attending school or living a free life impossible. This is now the 55th year of Israeli imposed horror on the Palestinian people.

Grown Palestinians must ask the permission of the occupying military government to leave ones own town. The Israeli government would not issue travel permits to the Palestinian delegation to attend the conference on the “peace process” in Britain.

Palestinian Bingo

by Linda Bevis

On Dec. 23, several ISM members visited the area where the Israeli forces (IDF) had blocked the road joining the city of Nablus with three outlying villages: Azmut, Salem, and Deir al-Khatab. Besides blocking at least two access roads to Nablus, the army has dug a large, steep moat to keep people from crossing fields to reach the Nablus access road. We had heard that the villagers were suffering from being cut off from jobs and food and hospitals in Nablus, as well as suffering from pollution coming from the chemical plant of the Israeli colony/settlement called Alon Moreh, which sits on two hills overlooking the three villages.

The roadblock is intermittently staffed by the IDF. Usually there is one Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) (looks like a tank, except it doesn’t have a large gun), with 3-4 soldiers at the wall of red earth that is the roadblock. Every time a Palestinian approaches the roadblock, slipping and sliding on the steep muddy paths approaching it from either side, the soldiers take his or her ID card. Then the Palestinian must wait in the rain and cold until the ID is returned. (These IDs are issued by the Israelis and are necessary to move around the country and to enter hospitals, etc.).

When we ISM internationals first arrived on the afternoon of Dec. 23, about 20 Palestinian men were crouching in the rain, forced to face one direction and not to move. The soldiers, meanwhile, were taking their time checking every ID by telephone. They seemed to wait til 10 or 15 IDs had been checked before allowing any of the 10 or 15 people to leave. Occasionally, the soldiers would allow one or two people who approached the roadblock to pass directly on through. Unfortunately, this had the effect of convincing more Palestinians to try to pass through. In our three days of roadblock watch so far, we have found that the vast majority of Palestinians who have tried to pass through the roadblock have been stopped and held for 2-7 hours. Those stopped have included men, women, and the occasional donkey. Usually, younger children, very old people, and people so sick that they are on stretchers, have been allowed through with minimal (though not the absence of) hassle.

During negotiations, the soldiers explained their behavior to us in the following ways: “this is a game of Palestinian Bingo: we gather all the IDs and sometimes we have a “bingo” and find a terrorist.” Thus, I understand Palestinian Bingo be a strategy of not only criminalizing but actually arresting an entire population, in hopes of sifting through them to shake out likely suspects. The soldiers insist that this harassment and collective punishment is “justified by the end result” of occasionally catching someone they believe might be trying to bomb children in Tel Aviv. Clearly they are fearful, often making men bare their bellies (to show no explosives) before allowing them to approach the soldiers.

Unfortunately, on the night of Dec. 23, the “bingo” was our friend Omar al Titi, who has been helping the nonviolent International Solidarity Movement and who had led us down to the roadblock thinking that any security check on himself would reveal that he was not “wanted”. That night, however, after making Omar squat with the men for 3 hours, the IDF said that he was a “wanted” man and arrested him (true? or just trumped up charges to punish the ISM?). Although internationals tried to block the APC’s exit, Omar was taken away. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

The ISM has been successful at the roadblock in ensuring that no one was beaten or shot while we were there. The people tell us that our presence helps prevent this, as well as preventing some of the more egregious humiliations such as being made to kneel in muddy rainwater (in plentiful supply). However, the people also tell us that sometimes their punishment is doubled after we leave, thereby emphasizing that we cannot afford to ignore places that we begin to help.

At the roadblock, we witness various levels of power games. One captain admits he’s been reprimanded for hitting soldiers and indeed he is the most rigid about making the detained men squat and face a certain direction – handcuffing any who attempt to speak to him. In another power trip, a young soldier with round glasses constantly aims his machine gun up the hill at little boys shouting far in the distance. When I stand before the rifle saying “I hope you aren’t going to shoot anyone”, he replies, “they’re throwing stones”, though they aren’t. He keeps aiming and I keep standing in front of the muzzle til my partner helps me realize that this is his power game with me. So I distract with another request to let the detainees go. Later, in the rain and dark, only one detainee is left, but the Captain will not let him go. At first, he says it’s because the man refused to call neighbors over to this Venus Flytrap of a roadblock when ordered to do so. Finally, the Captain tells us “because of you. You push too much. If not for you, this man would be gone.” We realize then that we have pushed our political discussion too far, and this last detainee has paid the price. We ask if it would help if we step back. He nods and we step away, out of the shimmer of APC headlights. Minutes later, this last detainee is freed. We have learned all kinds of lessons about power today.

It has been overpoweringly heartening at the roadblock to watch Palestinians approach Israeli soldiers (mostly 18-25 year olds here) as human beings and negotiate with them. There was ‘Assem, a high school counselor, speaking to the soldiers: “Tell me, human to human, what is the solution? Our village is cut off from food; our people are hungry, our animals are starving, we cannot get to our jobs, and we cannot get to the hospital. We are starving, what is the solution? If you tell me, I will try to do it. Tell me, not as a soldier, but as a human, what should we do?” There was Haithem, who works in the Nablus Tourism Office (a grim job this year!), walking up to the soldier and saying: “I did not try to sneak across the field, I did not try to climb over some mountain. I came here, to you, to this checkpoint. Now I am asking you to let me go to my job in Nablus, or let me go home to my two girls who are coming home from school now and will have noone at home to care for them.” And there was the man whose name I didn’t get, organizing the group of 20 today (Dec. 25): “Alright, everyone who has been here since 7 am and waited here patiently for the last 7 hours, stand in this group here. Everyone who has just arrived and been detained, please stand over there. Now, I ask you soldiers, even though your shift has just changed and everyone looks new to you, to please let all of us who have been here since 7 go home. Thank you.”

We also witness various levels of humanity from the soldiers. One APC crew allows the Palestinians to complete unloading animal feed across the roadblock, while the IDF checks IDs. Another crew allows the detainees to stand, sit and build a fire. They give a canteen of water to a devout student of Islamic studies who wants to pray. They allow some old women and women with children to pass across the roadblock without security checks. Most soldiers (especially the dual citizen from Baltimore) feel compelled to justify their obviously unkind job as moral, in order to protect Tel Aviv babies from bombs. But humane or abusive as each individual man is, all are still soldiers in an army whose rules require them to systematically and consistently violate international law by collectively punishing an entire population of men, women and children. In Palestine, all 3 million people are being forced daily to play one big cruel and unpredictable game of Bingo.

And amazingly, all of a sudden, all of those IDs which take “so long” to check according to the soldiers, materialized and were returned – all the ones that the soldiers had had for 7 hours AND the ones that they’d only had for 1/2 an hour. Suddenly, at 3 pm today (Dec. 25), all the people detained during the day were released. Who knows why – were the soldiers tired of standing in the rain, guarding old men and school girls and one soggy donkey? were they tired of the internationals and hoped they’d leave? were our calls to Hamoked (human rights organization) and the IDF spokesperson bearing fruit?…. The only thing that was clear was that it does NOT take a long time to check IDs, and if the soldiers really were there simply to increase Israeli security by checking IDs, the process could take less than 10 minutes for any one person.

Even though Captain Arial Zev of APC # 753731 claimed that he was not doing this to “humiliate” and that he was “just following orders” (his own words were not in response to anything we had said, for we had found engaging in political discussion fruitless and counterproductive), his actions spoke loudly of collectively humiliating and terrorizing and starving the people and animals of three small villages – a heroic group of courageous people retaining their dignity and community while trying to survive.

And as I sit here in an incongruous internet cafe in the midst of a refugee camp in Nablus and write this report, I wonder whether our replacement shift saw a whole new group of folks detained. I wonder how the two young men got home after we met them on the road and warned them that they’d most likely be detained if they tried to pass the roadblock. And I wonder where Omar is tonight. Is he, like 90% of the male Palestinian population who has been to prison (currently there are 5,500 in prison) being beaten and forced to stand all night tied to a pipe in some freezing, dripping courtyard, or bent double in a cold “closet” covered in a burlap bag soaked in feces? I dedicate this report to you, Omar al-Titi, as you showed us the way to the roadblock, and opened up your heart and house to us. I hope that the coming days find you free – and increasingly safe and warm.